Special Ops: Four Accounts of the Military's Elite Forces

by Orr Kelly

On 24 March, the operation received its most serious setback as the result of an accident rather than enemy action. Returning from a visit to Broadway, Wingate’s B-25 flew into a hill, and he and the other eight men onboard, including two war correspondents, were killed.

  Raymond J. Ruksas, of Phoenix, Arizona, who was one of the flying sergeants, and, half a century later, president of the Air Commando Association, recalls that day well:

  “Wingate, the day he died, called us together and said they were so happy with the work we were doing he would do his very best to see we got commissions. I wondered, how is a guy in the British army going to get us commissions in the American Army? And then I figured, being Wingate, he just might do it. Six hours later, he was dead.”

  As Ruksas recalls, only a handful of planes were sent out to look for Wingate’s plane when he was overdue at his next destination. From experience, they knew that, whenever someone was missing, they were likely to lose someone else looking for him. As it turned out, SSgt. Lloyd I. Samp found Wingate’s plane—and then he crashed in the jungle. Robertson spotted Samp’s plane and arranged for his rescue. They found him in a Burmese village.

  “The headhunters were very nice to him,” Robertson says.

  Instead of replacing Wingate with one of his aides who shared his enthusiasm for long-range penetrations, General Slim put Maj. Gen. W. D. A. Lentaigne in charge. Lentaigne did not like Wingate personally and didn’t agree with his hit-and-run tactics. He ordered the Chindits to combine into larger groups and assault major Japanese defensive positions. The troops had neither the training nor the heavy weapons needed for such operations.

  By that time, however, the Chindits had already achieved a major goal of their operation: to disrupt Japanese plans for an invasion of India. In their U-Go operation, the Japanese hoped to cross the border near the town of Imphal, defeat the British IV Corps, and march across India to establish a puppet government. But the offensive was repulsed, and the Japanese were forced to retreat back into Burma, eventually giving up the northern portion of the country.

  After the war, comments by Japanese officers and messages sent at the time revealed how much the airborne invasion had disrupted plans for the offensive.

  General T. Numata, chief of staff of the Japanese southern army, said: “The difficulty encountered in dealing with the airborne forces was ever a source of worry to all the headquarters staffs of the Japanese army and contributed materially to the Japanese failure.…”

  Even more telling was the message traffic from the headquarters of Lt. Gen. K. Sato, commander of the 31st Division. By May, his men were short of ammunition and almost all other supplies. The food shortage was so severe that the troops were subsisting on grass and black slugs and suffering from sickness. Sato revolted.

  “Since leaving the Chindwin, we have not received one bullet from you, nor a grain of rice,” he said in a message to 15th Army headquarters. When he prepared to withdraw his forces from the front, he was threatened with court martial. He sent back a rebellious response: “Do what you please. I will bring you [the commander of the 15th Army] down with me.… The 15th Army has failed to send me supplies and ammunition since the operation began. This failure releases me from any obligation to obey the order—and in any case it would be impossible to comply.”

  By the time the Japanese were feeling the full effect of the attacks by the commando forces, the entire operation was already over. At the end of March, Alison was called back to Washington to begin the formation of two more air commando units—the Second and Third. Arnold had visions of these new units going back in the next dry season to conquer Burma. But, by the time they were formed, the war had changed, and they were incorporated into conventional units fighting in the Pacific.

  By the end of April, the Chindits had been pulled back out of Burma, and the airfields at Lalaghat and Hailakandi, already knee-deep in water from the monsoon rains, had been abandoned for the monsoon season.

  In a period of less than two months, the air commandos had demonstrated convincingly that it was possible to fly a significant force deep into enemy territory, set up and defend a base of operations, and cause major damage to the enemy’s ability and will to fight.

  The light-plane pilots thought their portion of the war was over—at least for the time being—but they were wrong.

  “We thought we were going to come home,” Richard Snyder recalls, “but they told us, since we didn’t lose as many people as they thought we would, they were going to leave us there to go with the British troops the rest of the war. We did such a good job, they just said we could stay and help the British finish the war, thank you very much. We stayed on and supported the British troops all the way down to Rangoon. That took another year and a half. As they moved down, the British army would build a strip, and we’d move a squadron in there. We’d get their wounded and drop them supplies. And we did some artillery spotting for them.”

  Arnold called Cochran back to Washington and put him to work setting up an operation in Europe that would make Thursday seem like a little sideshow.

  CHAPTER 5

  Aerial Invasion of Germany

  When Cochran arrived back in the United States in the late spring of 1944, at about the time of the Normandy invasion in Europe, he was badly in need of a rest. He had either been in combat or in demanding command positions for more than two years. And he also suffered from hypoglycemia, a blood-sugar disorder that causes extreme fatigue. Although he had hidden the nature of his problem from his superiors so he could remain on flight status, he could not hide his fatigue. An officer from the inspector general’s office, on a swing through India, had seen how run-down he was and recommended that he be relieved of his job.

  Cochran managed to hang on in India until Operation Thursday was all wrapped up and then flew home. General Arnold hustled him off to a rehabilitation center in upstate New York and, in effect, offered him his choice of his next job.

  Before Cochran had completed his stay in the rehab center—and before he had decided what he would like to do next—Arnold called him in and gave him an intriguing new assignment.

  Having been impressed by the success of the airborne invasion of Burma, Arnold was eager to put this new technique to use—not only to help bring World War II to an end but also to demonstrate a new facet of air power that might be used in any future war. What he had in mind was an aerial invasion of Germany.

  Cochran later described his conversation with Arnold: “General Arnold could foresee an aerial invasion of Germany that would preclude the agonizing, arduous advancement across France and the lowlands up across Holland, and in the invasion of Germany.… Wouldn’t an air invasion hasten the end of the war and make the tough, tough ground action—the World War I kind of ground action, creeping forward and forward, the lines, and all that sort of thing—wouldn’t it make that unnecessary if in fact you could invade a country that was as strong and defensible as Germany? Could you do that? His mind was searching for that.”

  Cochran flew to England to begin preliminary work for the aerial invasion of Germany. The project was given the code name Arena. He didn’t need to be told to be as quiet as possible about what he was doing. Many, if not most, generals would see the whole project as a pie-in-the-sky operation that would simply waste the resources they needed to get on with fighting the war the old-fashioned way.

  Quietly gathering intelligence about the Allied and German forces and the geography of Germany, Cochran settled on a site for the aerial invasion of Germany. Even now, half a century later, it is awe-inspiring to look at a map and envision the audacious plan he had in mind. The site Cochran picked was the valley surrounding the industrial city of Kassel, deep inside Germany, 120 miles east of the Rhine River and hundreds of miles beyond the Allied armies fighting their way across France in the summer and fall of 1944, as they were already worried about the battle that faced them at the Rhine, Germany’s natural defense line on the western front.

  The Kassel Vall
ey is about thirty miles long and about eleven miles wide. It is surrounded by hills, with easily defended passes through the hills. Cochran counted eleven landing strips, including one fairly good-sized civilian airport.

  A major drawback to the use of the Kassel Valley was that a dam at one end of the valley contained a large reservoir. If the Germans opened the floodgates, they could flood a good part of the valley, thwarting the Allies’ plans to use it as a base. The planners decided this was not an insoluble problem. Either they could send airborne troops or commandos in just before the operation to seize the dam, or they could send bombers ahead of time to blow a hole in the dam and release the water so the valley would have time to dry out before the invasion.

  With his plans beginning to jell, Cochran sought an audience with Gen. George Patton. Of all the generals in Europe, Arnold had told him, Patton was the one who would be quickest to see the advantages of the aerial invasion. Cochran had never met Patton personally, but he had seen his formations from the air in North Africa and knew how he liked to dash, with his tanks, deep behind enemy lines, relying on the air force to protect his flanks.

  They met at a dinner party in the headquarters of Gen. O. P. Weyland, whose aircraft were providing the flanking protection for Patton’s dash across France. Cochran told Patton why he was there. Patton drew him off to the side, and the two men sat on a stairway, where they couldn’t be overheard. Years later, Cochran’s enthusiasm for the plan he outlined to Patton was still obvious:

  “They were planning this thing of crossing the Rhine. It looked like it was going to be a terrific confrontation, and the casualties and the losses would be horrendous.… Why not get Patton around in behind … and supply him with an area that was a hundred times as big as the stronghold that Wingate built in Burma? Make it a large stronghold, the whole Kassel Valley, and pour in enough troops in there, enough infantry, enough artillery, and enough tanks to hold the area. Then build it, and build it with the biggest aerial invasion anyone ever saw, and use every airplane the air force could find and just launch a massive, massive effort and make it the deciding effort, the final effort.”

  As Cochran saw the plan, the Allied armies would get behind the Germans and race to Berlin, leaving the enemy cut off and surrounded.

  Patton’s style of hell-for-leather warfare was plagued by one serious weakness: his tanks moved so fast that, when they ran out of gas, the whole offensive stalled until the fuel trucks caught up with them. The aerial invasion concept promised to solve this problem by giving Patton a sanctuary to head for—a friendly enclave deep in enemy territory where he could refuel, rearm, and rest his tank crews.

  “That’s a hell of a good idea.…” he told Cochran. “Let’s get going on this.…”

  Before letting Cochran get back to work, Patton provided a bit of battlefield hospitality. He invited him out to see how the ground war was fought—and to get shot at.

  Cochran had plenty of combat hours in the air, but he had never been involved in a battle on the ground. Patton took him to a point on the front lines where the Army was trying to bridge a narrow stream. What Cochran saw reinforced his resolve to leapfrog behind the German army and avoid a head-on collision.

  Just across a small river, Cochran could see German snipers picking off American soldiers who were trying to bridge the stream. As he watched, several of the men toppled into the water. Cochran was appalled. He told his hosts that trying to build a bridge in the face of such fire was the stupidest thing he had ever seen.

  With Patton’s blessing, Cochran came out into the open and began developing detailed plans for the operation, working toward a full-scale briefing for Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, the overall commander. The planners gathered a growing number of supporters. But there was also serious and determined opposition. The British supported a dash across the north German plain to swoop down on Berlin from the north. The aerial invasion didn’t fit into their plans. The strategic bomber command wanted nothing to detract from their effort to crush Germany from the air. And even some in the fighter community, who might be expected to support such an audacious undertaking, raised objections.

  Do you realize, the fighter pilots asked, that the biggest air battle in history will take place over this valley?

  Cochran agreed. But, with the Germans low on fuel, low on pilots, and with few planes left, he argued that the plan to leapfrog behind the Nazi lines would force the Luftwaffe into a battle in which it would be destroyed. The Allies would then have total control of the air over the battlefield.

  “Many of the air people and the troop people thought our plans were too ambitious, that we couldn’t load and take off airplanes and tow gliders that fast,” Cochran recalled. “Our answer to that was to show them what we had done in the jungle, for heaven’s sake, and how fast we could go.”

  Eisenhower seemed favorably impressed. He noted that Cochran had been involved in Wingate’s operation in Burma and asked: “What do you think of this plan?”

  “General, I dreamed it up,” Cochran replied.

  Eisenhower chuckled, slapped the papers outlining the plan, and said: “I like this plan. I think it ought to be done.”

  But the war on the battlefield outran the planning. After the Germans’ last big effort in the Battle of the Bulge, in the winter of 1944–45, it was apparent that their ability to defend the Reich was rapidly disintegrating.

  Patton crossed the Rhine at several points and dashed northeast, through the Fulda Gap, past the Kassel Valley, and on toward Berlin.

  While plans for a Burma-style aerial invasion of Germany by air commandos were being prepared, another breed of air commandos was fighting its own brand of warfare in Europe. They called themselves the Carpetbaggers.

  PART 2

  Behind the Lines in Europe

  CHAPTER 6

  The Carpetbaggers Are Born

  If the air commandos in Burma suffered from disease, jungle, monsoons, and Japanese guns, they at least had one great advantage: strong and unwavering support in the person of General Arnold.

  In western Europe, life tended to be a bit more comfortable than in Southeast Asia, but there was little support from on high for those attempting to develop a special operations capability. In some cases, there was active opposition, both in the field and in Washington.

  The lack of support and even hostility would be very familiar to later generations of air commandos. In that sense, the special operators in Europe were more truly the forebears of younger air commandos than were the more favored units in Burma.

  That the predecessors of today’s air commandos were able to mount major special operations campaigns in both northern and southern Europe was due to persistence, changing circumstances as time went by, and, in no small measure, luck.

  The first to see the need for special operations were the imaginative officers of the Office of Strategic Services. Formed in July 1941—five months before the United States entered the war—the wartime spy agency was at first known as the Office of the Coordinator of Information (COI). It was headed by Gen. William J. Donovan, a World War I hero and New York lawyer. In June of 1942, the COI was reorganized and became the Office of Strategic Services. Unlike the Central Intelligence Agency, which emerged as the successor to the OSS after the war, Donovan’s outfit was organized along military lines and was an agency of the military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff.

  At least as early as the beginning of 1943, the OSS began pressing for the creation of special units to operate behind the lines in German-occupied Europe. One goal was to insert spies to gather intelligence. The other goal was to provide help, in the form of supplies, technical support, and leadership, to resistance movements so they would be able to do their part, behind enemy lines, when the invasion of Europe came in the spring of 1944. This classic guerrilla warfare would have been impossible—at least on such a large scale—without the support of air power. The OSS interest focused on two broad areas.

  In the north, within reach of planes
based in England, were France, Holland, Belgium, Denmark, and Norway. One estimate prepared by the OSS calculated that there would be 160,000 resistance fighters—the equivalent of about ten divisions—available in France alone to disrupt the German response to the Allied invasion. In Norway, it was estimated that, by the beginning of 1945, there would be 30,000 people actively involved in the resistance movement and another 20,000 who could be activated during an Allied effort to liberate the country.

  In the south, interest focused primarily on Yugoslavia, although there were also significant resistance movements in northern Italy, Greece, and Albania. Portions of southern France were also reachable by planes flying out of North Africa and Italy. In Yugoslavia, Josip Broz, known as Marshal Tito, was building a force that would eventually grow to a significant army—big enough to tie down seventeen German divisions.

  The British had begun clandestine flights into German-occupied parts of Europe and were operating, at least on a small scale, from Norway to the Balkans. But many of their flights to deliver agents and supplies were made with small, single-engine Lysander planes, capable of carrying only a couple of people or a small amount of supplies. The Americans carried out a few experiments with B-25 medium bombers, but quickly concluded that they were too small and had too short a range to be effective.

  What was needed to do the job, as the British had learned, were big, long-range four-engine bombers. But in early 1943, as Donovan and his people pressed their case for aid to the resistance movements, such bombers were in desperately short supply. Lieutenant General Ira C. Eaker, commander of the Eighth Air Force, based in England, had only 337 B-17 and B-24 heavy bombers in his arsenal, far fewer than the numbers he needed for the sustained daylight raids against Germany that Arnold and other advocates of victory through air power demanded.

  Bomber production began to surge in 1943 (the United States eventually produced more than eighteen hundred B-24 bombers alone), but losses to enemy antiaircraft guns and fighters also mounted alarmingly. On 1 August, fifty-four B-24s were lost in an attack on the Ploiesti oil fields in Rumania. On 17 August, sixty B-17s went down in a raid on industrial plants in Schweinfurt and Regensburg.